Transformation
by finallyanusername
Summary: A story of strong friendships, eccentric teachers and mysterious perils.


Chapter 1 – The Perfect Family and the Weird Cousin

* * *

There was nothing about the well-maintained house, well-educated bread-winner, and relatively well-off Dursley family to suggest anything strange or mysterious about them. They were a traditional family from southeast England, though surely not a particularly distinguished one. The Dursleys could be seen on an ample variety of historic documents, from old train tickets to tiny villages street names. A present, yet unnoticed bunch, they had not changed much from those old days.

The Dursleys of today lived in Little Whinging, Surrey – a town that even a passionate lover of the islands geography would be hard pressed to find. An inconspicuous city called home by an ordinary family of three, on the outskirts of a larger town, which were certainly doing nothing suspicious or unnatural, believe them – they, for some reason, always liked to really drive this point home.

There you have it: the most normal, most boring family. And, look at that, proud to be that way. Not a very interesting ambition, but certainly not a reproachful one too. Great for them.

But there was one more thing they didn't like to account for. One little and special thing: a boy, a polite one at that – they lucked out on that one. The boy was adorably sweet, it was rather impressive they couldn't find it in themselves to like him, and it was a pity he didn't have another place to go.

The family "friends" did try looking up on him. He didn't have an uncle, nor a distant cousin, nor any close relationship with anyone within the country it seemed. They were even speculating his father was – God forbid it – french. He was well-cared at least, and, because of that, they hadn't put too much effort looking onto it

It's not like there was a better option for him after all, it seemed. So, the best of the luck to him, it was then.

But his relatives didn't like him. Just like that. For no apparent reason whatsoever. At least, that was what it looked like from the Privet Drive's neighbours perspective. The purposefully constructed perfect image of a family just couldn't be maintained. One look at Vernon's face when all of them were out was enough to see the wobbly facade.

A perfect family of four that couldn't be, just transformed into a dysfunctional mess of pretense and prejudice, that liked to think themselves as a perfect family of three, and the weird relative.

Time made its job, and what it looked like an intervention case at first, turned into a bothersome fruitless endeavor, which turned into a "it's not that bad, is it?", which turned into "one of much life's adversities for him", which turned into normalcy. It was a society's failure – one of much more. The boy would go on to an extraordinary path, but many others wouldn't. His story was an exception to the rule.

Never should a child go through a childhood like that. All efforts to remedy any similar situation should be made.

But they weren't, and so the story begins.

Harry James Potter was a stark contrast to his relatives. The messy-dark-haired boy stood out on the family photos – those that Petunia, his aunt, thought better to stay inside boxes on the attic –, like a smudge, if you were to hear Vernon's, his uncle, opinion. He had round glasses and a peculiar lightning shaped scar on his forehead, his most unique trait. He always had it, a result of the car crash that killed his parents.

It was a kind of a link between him and his family. His true family. The one he was sure that cared for him. He could only make out vague resemblances of them, but they were there. He didn't bought it for a second that they were the drunk idiots his uncle made them to be. It just didn't settled in right.

To be accurate, it's not like he didn't believed his uncle; but more that he chose not to believe.

And when he hesitated about his stubbornness, this feeling came back: of comfortness and safety, of better days, that were there, but he just couldn't remember. He only wished his few remembrances didn't have so much of that green light. With that in mind, life was a little easier, knowing he hadn't needed to look up his uncle Vernon or his cousin Dudley. He could cling onto the sparse memories he had, knowing that anyone who could make such terrible claims about his parents were the opposite of what he should strive to be.

It wasn't an articulate attitude for a long time, but he gradually saw that not fitting in with that bunch was not such a bad thing, after all.

When he was a little child, he wished for their approval. A little more down the road, he wished they would just leave him be. Dudley certainly had. Now, he just couldn't care that much for them. Vernon absolutely despised him still, which Harry never understood why, but now just gave him the silent treatment. Dudley tried to bully him on the beginning, but lost his will to do it when his father began to gave Harry a cold shoulder. Occasionally he would chat with his cousin, nothing more. His aunt Petunia, on the other hand.

Petunia Dursley was a mystery to him. While she was definitely not as indifferent to him like his other relatives, she was the angriest when the occasional… accident occurred. But, at the same time, it was her that bought him some books, his clothes, and took him off to Guildford to make his glasses.

"Your father used a similar pair of rounded glasses, you know. Maybe you should try it."

At the same time she was the most severe, Harry saw a glimpse of what it could've been a better stay with his relatives. Like the time she taught him how to make Dudley's favourite chocolate cake, like the time she surprised him describing a little of his parents. He had been fascinated knowing about his mother. She didn't favoured his father all that much, but at least he knew a little about him too. Like the time she took them to a trip on a friend of Vernon's country house. He didn't remembered too much of the trip, for he was very young.

But this Petunia was the same person that went ballistic after the country house incident. He remembered him and his cousin playing with lower tree branches, till one of them moved. After that, it was only shouting. It was the same Petunia that deliberately cut a larger share of the dishes to his cousin, right in front of him, while giving him the smallest of it. It was the same Petunia that told him to do manual labour, which would, in her words, curb his unnatural tendencies.

Tendencies that he couldn't, to this day, explain.

He could not explain how he made the tree branch stop dead on its tracks, or how it moved and talked in the first place, he couldn't explain how he appeared on the school's roofing, he couldn't explain how his hair grew at such unnatural rates when that horrendous haircut was made, motivated by one of Vernon's business partners comments on his nephew's disheveled appearance.

He tried to investigate it, but found that he couldn't do it at will. He tried to ask his relatives, but they became infuriated when it was even mentioned. He tried to look up books, and nothing came up. Nothing non-fiction at least.

So, he tried to get out of the way of trouble, not wanting those accidents to occur again.

That, he decided, was the best way of handling it. Stay out of trouble, until he figured out what those incidents meant. If he figured out it. With his luck…

"Harry," his aunt Petunia called him from his bedroom's door. A open letter was in her hands, and her face was unreadable. "There was something for you from today's mail."


End file.
